“A 22-year-old woman in the United States is publicly auctioning her virginity to pay for her college education, sparking a heated online debate about sex and morality,”says Reuters.

Personally, I support the idea. I am for a world without the need of prostitution of course, but read more carefully the article to see that life is not really Utopian:

– Her mother, a fourth grade teacher, does not agree with her decision.
– The auction will take place at a Nevada brothel where her sister is working to pay off her college debts.

So, what do we have here? A mother, who can’t pay for her kids’ college. A sister, who’s been down that road before and she has to sell herself repeatedly in order to pay the college debts. If anything, “Natalie” does the clever thing by initiating an auction. By doing this one-time thing, she clears herself from future, daily even, prostitution.

But I ask you: why isn’t their family able to pay for their college? Instead of having the mother “disagreeing”, where is her second job to help pay for her kids’ education? Where is the father? In Greece, there is no family that wouldn’t do their best to support financially their kids during university or college. And going further: why do you even have to pay for education? For example, I think Stanford Uni costs about $200,000 a year these days.

This blog post will have to go around the same path as some of my older ones: college education in the US is extremely expensive, in sharp contrast with most European countries where entering a university or college is usually free or low-cost. The fault here is not the morality of “Natalie”, but the system she has to abide to. So she simply plays out according to the rules of the capitalistic system. She has no alternative, because the alternative would be not just a night off, but many years of prostitution — like her sister.

Unless her college offers her a free tuition, even if it would be just for PR reasons, “Natalie” does what she must do to survive and have a future. I rank education as that important. If you have a problem with all that, write to your congressman.

Asking if I would ever do what she does, the answer is “no”. But she’s not me, and I fully understand her reasons for doing so.